Double Or Nothing

This piece is completely fictional. Any events, names, or places that relate to real life are only coincidence.

I was sixteen years old when they lowered my best friend of nine years into the ground.

I was sixteen years old wanting to unzip my veins and bleed out. I knew that not even two days ago I had seen her face for the last time. There wouldn't be anymore us.

When you're young, in your glory days, there's so many things you and your best friend plan on doing together. Road trips, sleepovers, prom, graduation, double-dates. We were a painted picture for the phrase "double or nothing." All for one and one for all. You expect double the trouble from two best friends, but never a double suicide.

Never a double suicide attempt.

The ground would soon be closing in over her, the dirt would mix together and grass would grow fresh on top of her decaying body. What an awful thing it is to lay still, a lifeless body as it rots for all of eternity in a wooden box.

She had always been stronger than me in every single god damned way. And I envied it. Not the selfish greed kind of envy, the kind in which I looked up to her and I knew she was my hero. My day one, my ride or die. Over the course of my sixteen years here in this dreadful place, I'd been in four car crashes, had one hundred and forty six scars on my arms and legs, dyed my hair eight times, and gone through two best friends. I'd finally lost my second. My forever. But none of it had killed me.

Plotting your suicide with your best friend isn't something you would or should consider to be friendship goals, but we were different.

We were sitting on the back porch of her dads house at 3:27 in the morning when we both threw our heads back as the pills traveled down our throats and landed heavy in our stomachs. The second after I swallowed I wanted to take it all back. We had been drinking, we had been smoking weed just an hour ago. She was laughing and I was wheezing at the pain that had suddenly overcome my lungs. It was anxiety, and bad. I wanted to take it back more than I wanted my next breath. Inside my lungs were heaving as I tried to make myself throw it all up but I couldn't make it happen. Things weren't connecting. Why did we do this?

She's going to die.

I'm going to die.

Downing sleeping pills and whiskey with your best friend? That's the way to go. I was leaning back in the plastic chair trying to relax now, which was becoming easier. I looked up at the stars and just watched. Minutes passed, maybe hours before I got up. Something was wrong. I was still alive, and she wasn't moving. There was no more laughing. Something had gone horribly wrong with this already horrible idea, and I was left to feel it all alone. My legs trembled as I made my way toward my best friend. I heard myself screaming as I tried to shake her, I heard her dad open the screen door and run outside, already dialing on his phone. Collapsing to the ground, I felt this sharp pain in my chest as I watched while my best friends dad tried to revive her lifeless body. I knew I was alone now, I was going to be stuck here. Hating every god awful moment that this life had to offer me.

She did it. And I couldn't.

I couldn't.

Now she would waste away inside a hole in the earth, nothing more than soulless corpse. She wouldn't laugh anymore, she wouldn't drink with me when I was sad anymore, she wouldn't call me to come pick her up when her family was arguing anymore. She wouldn't have me, and I wouldn't haven her anymore. A selfish thing it is to wish that I was laying next to her. Anything would have been better than the way things are now. Or how they're going to be.

Anything is better than all the days that will follow this one, when can't get out of bed because there's no purpose anymore. When I can't kill myself because there's nobody to do it with me. I had no one. But I guess she didn't either. She suffered through a silent death alone, and now I was going to suffer alone for the rest of my life. Why didn't it work?

Why didn't it work?

I want to scream it at the top of my lungs but there's no answer. There never will be.

Only silence without you here.

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